Adiabatic femtosecond pulse compression and control by using quadratic cascading nonlinearity

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate that adiabatic compression of femtosecond pulse can be achieved by employing the management of quadratic cascading nonlinearity in quasi-phase-matching gratings. Cascading nonlinearity is not a simple analogy with third-order optical nonlinearity in term of the engineering properties of the magnitude and focusing (or defocusing) nonlinearity. Femtosecond pulse compression is investigated based on type-I (e: o + o) collinear QPM geometry of aperiodically poled MgO-doped LiNbO 3 (MgO: LN). Group-velocity-matching condition is chosen to generate quadratic femtosecond soliton consisting of fundamental (FF) and second harmonic (SH) pulses. Adiabatic-like compression process is observed in the length of 50 mm linearly chirped QPM. Cascading nonlinearity is local managed, instead of dispersion management used in fiber adiabatic soliton compression. Quadratic soliton including FF and SH pulses are obtained from the compression of 95 fs FF pulse in the initial experiments. Dependence on the phase mismatch and group velocity mismatch, cascading nonlinearity has a flexible property and presents a new challenge for exploring femtosecond pulse shaping and control. The demonstrated pulse compression and control based on cascading nonlinearity is useful for generation of shorter pulses with clean temporal profiles, efficient femtosecond second harmonic generation and group-velocity control.